Sharp FX Plus (AT&T)

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• Pros

  Inexpensive. Solid QWERTY keyboard. Great battery life.

• Cons

  Sluggish performance. Poor camera.

• Bottom Line

  The Sharp FX Plus is the best keyboarded Android phone on AT&T, but there are better options out there if you're willing to go touch-screen-only.

Don’t be fooled by the photos: this is not a Sidekick 4G ($99.99, 4 stars). Though the Sharp FX Plus (Free with 2-year contract, $349.99 without), certainly looks like T-Mobile's classy smartphone, it’s a less ambitious device. Available exclusively through Walmart, the FX Plus is a good choice for AT&T texters looking to save a few bucks, and it’s the best keyboarded Android phone available on AT&T. Just keep in mind that it isn't a do-everything, high-end super-smartphone.

Design, Screen, and Keyboard
The FX Plus measures 4.7 by 2.4 by .6 inches (HWD) and weighs 5.3 ounces. Made entirely of black plastic, it feels solid, though it looks somewhat generic. The 3.2-inch display is a standard 320-by-480 pixel resolution. The glass capacitive touch screen is bright and suitably responsive. There are four physical function keys below the screen which are backlit and easy to press.

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The screen slides up to reveal a solid, four-row QWERTY keyboard, which looks a lot like T-Mobile's Sidekick 4G. Unlike the Sidekick, however, the FX Plus lacks the extra fifth row of dedicated number keys. Still, the slightly raised, flat keys are easy to press, and I was able to type long messages quickly and easily. This is a very good keyboard for typing messages on.

Specifications

Service Provider

AT&T

Operating System

Android OS

Screen Size

3.2 inches

Screen Details

320-by-480-pixel, 262K-color TFT LCD capacitive touch screen

Camera

Yes

Network

GSM, UMTS

Bands

850, 900, 1800, 1900, 2100

High-Speed Data

GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA

Processor Speed

600 MHz

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Call Quality, OS, and Apps
The FX Plus is a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) and tri-band HSPA 7.2 (850/1900/2100 MHz) device with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. It requires AT&T’s $15-per-month data plan just like the carrier’s other smartphones.

Reception is average, and voice quality is just OK. Voices sound full and relatively clear in the phone’s earpiece, though I could detect a faint background hiss when placing calls in a quiet room. The speakerphone doesn’t go loud enough to use outdoors. On the other end, calls placed with the Plus were full of static and fuzz; voices were still understandable, but not particularly pleasant. Calls sounded decent through an Aliph Jawbone Icon Bluetooth headset ($99, 4 stars), but again, voices were somewhat scratchy. Battery life was quite good, at 7 hours and 16 minutes of talk time. But I'm going to call this a phone for typing, not talking on.

The FX Plus is powered by a 600MHz Qualcomm MSM7227 CPU and runs Android 2.2.2 (Froyo). The OS is a step behind the current generation (Gingerbread) and there's no word from Sharp on whether or not it will be updated. The older CPU is standard for an entry-level Android phone, and benchmark results were similar to the LG Phoenix (Free, 3.5 stars), but performance was way behind higher-end Android devices. This will be adequate for basic apps like e-mail and texting, but gamers should look elsewhere.

Though it isn't running stock Android, Sharp hasn’t modified things too heavily, and performance was pretty smooth across the board. Unfortunately, Sharp’s choice of icons gives the UI a somewhat cheap look and feel. Still, there are seven customizable home screens you can swipe between, and Sharp has preloaded a number of useful widgets on them, including a calendar, messaging hub, weather reports, Facebook and Twitter. There’s some undeletable bloatware, though luckily Sharp has kept it to a minimum.

Like most other Android phones, the FX Plus has a great browser, along with comprehensive e-mail, Exchange, and Outlook integration. Google Maps Navigation, which features voice-enabled GPS directions, is free, and you have access to over 200,000 apps in Android Market, most of which should run just fine. You can also install apps from outside the Market, which you couldn't do on older AT&T phones.

Multimedia, Camera, and Conclusions
The FX Plus is a decent media phone. There’s 138MB of free internal memory, and Sharp includes a 2GB microSD card in a slot under the battery cover. My 32GB SanDisk card worked fine as well. The music player is stock Android, and was able to play every major music format I tried. There’s a standard 3.5mm headphone jack on top of the phone, and music sounded pretty good, though bass response was oddly lacking. This wasn’t the case over Altec Lansing Backbeat Bluetooth headphones ($99.99, 3.5 stars); tracks sounded clear and crisp, with plenty of bass.

Standalone videos looked somewhat dim and lackluster on the phone’s 3.2-inch screen. On the other hand, most standard video codecs are supported and played back just fine, as long as they were formatted for the phone's screen. The phone tried to play 720p and 1080p high-def videos, but they were so choppy they were unwatchable.

The 3-megapixel auto-focus camera has no flash and an unacceptably slow 1.8-second shutter delay, but test photos looked decent. They were somewhat blown out and lacking in detail, but good enough to post on social networking sites. The video camera, on the other hand, was terrible. It only records VGA videos, which played back at around 15 frames per second, but looked like a clippy, pixelated mess.

AT&T has a bunch of great Android phones, but it doesn’t have any one great Android phone with a physical keyboard. The BlackBerry Torch 9800 ($49.99, 4 stars) has a good keyboard and a nice touch screen, but it can’t touch the FX Plus when it comes to media or games. The LG Phoenix is free and trades a physical keyboard for a slightly better video camera. If you’re willing to spend some extra money, the HTC Inspire 4G ($99.99, 4 stars) features better voice quality and a killer 4.3-inch LCD, along with HTC’s slick Sense UI overlay, though it too lacks a keyboard. So if you’re a diehard texter looking for a keyboarded Android phone on AT&T, the Sharp FX Plus is your best option right now.

Benchmarks
Continuous talk time: 7 hours 16 minutes

Source:http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2391137,00.asp?kc=PCRSS05039TX1K0000762